Kajabi vs Teachable: Your Ultimate Comparison Guide (with Infographics)

When deciding to create an online course, one of the most important decisions you’ll make starting out, is which platform to use for hosting your online programs. For most, key factors to consider include cost, ease of use, customer experience, back-office navigation, reliability, and mobile-friendly. To help you navigate the waters of which platform is best for you, let’s look at the comparison between Kajabi and Teachable.

Kajabi vs Teachable has been a hot topic on my radar since last year, especially after helping several clients convert their accounts from Teachable to Kajabi. Let’s take a quick look at some key features of both so that you can quickly compare and decide which might be best for you.

For one, we know that both Kajabi and Teachable are a type of Content Management System that enables you to create and house digital products like webinars, courses, or E-books. Both are also powerhouses when it comes to accessing everything you need for your online business—also known as “one-stop-shop” for everything you need for creating, branding, and marketing digital products.

Although they have similarities, we’ll see how these two can have distinct features and will later learn if Kajabi is indeed much better than Teachable and vice versa.

Today, creating online courses has become a fast-growing niche industry. Not just because it’s convenient and it reaches people globally, but also because it’s lucrative. Due to these reasons, it’s crucial to know the perfect platform to use so you can save time, money and effort.

Product Creation and Course Structure

We can’t deny the fact that both Kajabi and Teachable are top-notch when it comes to supporting you in crafting online courses and other digital products in whatever form – audio, video, digital print.

Creating a concise yet understandable flow in your course structure can make or break the customer experience, results achieved, and a user’s desire to continue with you for other programs. For this, both Kajabi and Teachable allow categorization of the topics/modules/categories.

In this area though, Kajabi went the extra mile (and it’s a good thing!). Aside from categories, Kajabi also offers the subcategory option to divide the category into tiny bite-sized chunks further to have an easily digestible online course. Not only that, but you can set the categories and subcategories to be viewed all at once or on a “drip” setting so that the user only sees the sections you want them to until the designated time that the new content is “released.”

These features help you create an online course that fits the learning styles of your audience in manageable sections that are less overwhelming and make it easier to learn.

One question that sometimes comes up, is how many courses or online products you can have inside each platform. Both Kajabi and Teachable have different “levels” in which you can enroll. All of Teachable’s plans include unlimited courses, although they also charge a 5% fee on all transactions at their basic plan. Kajabi’s basic plan offers up to three products and the number of products increases based on the plan you choose after that.

Member’s Progress and Engagement Trackability

Next in our consideration list is the engagement trackability and member’s progress or student progress.

Both Kajabi and Teachable excel in this area. You can have a detailed analysis and report of how your students are progressing with the online course and which part of the course they usually get stuck on. This will enable you to analyze valuable data so that if needed, you can make some improvement to the parts of your online course where your audience might be getting stuck before moving on to the next lesson.

Branding and Design

The look and feel of your online pages and courses will set the tone for your whole online business. You want your pages to represent you, your message, and what solution you are offering to your audience. You want your site to look professional on any device, and ideally, you want to exceed expectations.

When it comes to branding and design or product theming, in my honest opinion, Teachable has quite limited customization options. Yes, you can change the logo, the color scheme, and the typography but that’s pretty much it!

In Kajabi, you have much more flexibility in how you design your pages, products, emails, offers, checkout pages, assessments, and forms. And, since each page, product, and section is completely unique from each other, you can actually have custom pages with custom menu navigation throughout your account! This opens the door for endless possibilities on what you can do in your marketing, delivery, and nurturing!

Kajabi offers tons of customization options like adding sections, adding animations, sidebars, different themes and different layout options. Plus, with the new Page Editor, you can even customize your pages with sections specific to Desktop View and others specific to Mobile View! How cool is that?

So, no matter what digital products you offer, rest assured that you can present your products beautifully since you will have limitless choices when it comes to the design and themes.

Website Features

Similar to branding, website features are important, especially when creating an offer page or even creating a blog.

Teachable and Kajabi website functionalities look similar at first glance, but you can see the difference once you delve deeper into creating your website. Teachable can be neat, looks minimalistic, but Kajabi offers you more customization, in which you can personalize it according to the digital product you are selling.

Availability of Tools for Marketing Strategies

No matter how exceptional your product is, if there are no marketing efforts involved, it just won’t work. On top of that, selling a product won’t be easy if your targets don’t know who you are, your story, what you are offering, and if you have zero engagements with them.

Now, don’t get me wrong but this is where Teachable fell short miserably. Teachable marketing tools are almost nonexistent. Although they allow its users to develop their own Sales page, it’s customizability is still limited at best. So, if using Teachable as your platform, you might need to spend another $500 for third party marketing applications.

They may offer email functionality, just like Kajabi, but its use is mostly for announcements only. Sure, it can be enough for some businesses, but let’s be honest – we need something more than just notifications and announcements.

We need to cultivate customer loyalty, send out nurturing conversations, promotions, and we can only make that possible by leveling up our email marketing game – the designs, the content, the personalization.

Kajabi offers a "one-stop-shop" for your marketing needs.  All the essential marketing tools are already built-in on the platform. What you otherwise might need to purchase separately, is already in Kajabi – Sales pages, Thank you Pages, Video Pages, Opt-in forms for landing pages, email marketing with plenty of designs or layouts to choose from, and many more.

Besides, Kajabi also allows you to optimize your Sales Page and Emails to become mobile-friendly and has a Pipeline feature.  Add to that the ability to create automated actions, email triggers, and other "rules",  Kajabi definitely has an edge over the other platforms like Teachable.

Pricing Plans and Free Trials

Looking at the pricing plans of both platforms, at first blush, Teachable is a bit cheaper than Kajabi on the surface. On average, comparing the pricing of both platforms on a Pro Plan level, Kajabi and Teachable are about the same at around $399/month.

Basic plans for Kajabi and Teachable are more pronounced with Kajabi starting at $119/month and Teachable starting at $29/month (on annual plans).  Keep in mind, however, that you're not necessarily comparing apples to apples, rather more apples to oranges at this level.

Now, here’s a deal-breaker. Although Teachable will cost you less, however, since no marketing tools are built-in on their platform, you will need to pay additional cash for third-party marketing tools.  These tools may cost upwards of $500 per month.

Come to think of it, if you paid a bit extra for Kajabi, you will not only get the brilliant tools to create and design stunning products, emails and sales pages, but you will also get the much-needed marketing tools! On top of that, you also enjoy reliable customer support from Kajabi.

Both Kajabi and Teachable offer free trials so you can test it out first before making up your mind. However, Kajabi offers it only on a few days. Teachable offer free account for life but with a catch – it has extremely limited functionalities.  Wanting to try Kajabi?  Use my Affiliate Partner link below and get an extended trial for a full 28 days (rather than the usual 14 days).

Verdict

Although Kajabi and Teachable are excellent when it comes to offering and delivering online courses, it all comes down to the overall value you get between these two platforms.

Teachable is gaining popularity as an entry-level platform because it has the essentials of creating and delivering online courses or products at a much cheaper price...at least it appears so at first blush... but is it really a savings? Depending on your goal, Teachable is enough to get you through your online course creation and delivery. But that’s it. You have to spend more for the third-party marketing tools since they don’t have it on their platform.

In Kajabi, you get all the things you need. And it’s useful not only on creating and selling digital products but also on thriving in this industry. It’s an all-in-one platform that offers product creation, distribution, and marketing. You get premium designs that have that wow-factor, always on up-to-date, ever-improving tools, and customization capabilities. Although it can look much more expensive than Teachable, you actually get much more overall value from Kajabi. 

Thinking about starting an online program?  Schedule a free strategy call today to go over how best to get started so you can save time, reach more people, and get your program out to the world.